The Nine of Diamonds

Surroial Mordantless

Publication Date : 20 Oct 2016

ISBN: 9781780373249

Pages: 65
Size :216 x 138mm
Rights: World

The Nine of Diamonds: Surroial Mordantless is a book in nine parts constructed to play the Butcher – the Duke of Cumberland – in a Gaelic interpretation of the ghost gamble. Given the command on the back of a nine of diamonds – the Curse of Scotland – that the Highlanders should all be slaughtered, the persecution of Jacobite sympathisers after the Battle of Culloden under the Butcher was one of the worst atrocities carried out on British soil.

Using a kaleidoscope, a deck of tarot cards and an 1895 Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, The Nine of Diamonds is influenced by French surrealism and opens with the Gaelic visionary practice of inducing visions behind a waterfall. Treating the Highlands as a Gaelic garden, the rebels on the run as herds of deer, and the preservation of Gaelic culture as a type of sugar-cured mummification, The Nine of Diamonds is set in a phantasmagoric landscape described in the Scots of Henryson and Dunbar but evoking Scots Gaelic concepts and motifs to mix Highland and Lowland experience with magical and occult terminology.

With the deer as a central image, MacGillivray’s poems draw from Nijinsky as gravity-defying faun, from Mallarmé, Duchamp and Breton. Written in the run up to the 2014 Scottish referendum, The Nine of Diamonds operates as a powerful wish-text. In this strange vision populated by badly-wired and furious neon unicorns, escorticati preparing their own bodies, Second World War MacLeod fighter pilots with talismanic photographs of the clan’s Fairy Flag in their uniform pockets, pole-dancing fauns, stained glass knights and rusty kaleidoscopes, the underlying message is clear: in playing the Butcher back, MacGillivray is still here.

'Occulted, fire-warped, close-stitched in freshly butchered skin, MacGillivray's keening rant is prophecy, hot and plain. A sequence of cards dealt in the wake of shamanic seizures that happen, and happen again, only because the poet insists on their ghostly witness. Here are songs of fierce tenderness and subtle cruelty. They sting in salt like a Highland curse. I relish every breath of the fall and crush.' – Iain Sinclair

'Luscious, generous and always terrifyingly wise, MacGillivray's unique poetic intelligence has crafted a work we have all been secretly waiting for. Its voice and the crystal breath between the words awakens histories and futures that are vividly permeable to our memory and longing. A twilight cartomancy born between open heath and midnight cave; sublime in rage, quick in beauty and hopelessly decade to love.' – B. Catling

The Nine of Diamonds is MacGillivray’s second book of poetry. Her first, The Last Wolf of Scotland, was published by Pighog in 2013.

‘MacGillivray is the adopted “Highland” name of Edinburgh-based poet and performance artist Kirsten Norrie. With the embalming skill of an agitated undertaker she reconnects a variety of associated visions and versions of same… there is a long postscript and copious notation yet I remain blissfully bewildered. “Blissful” because, “Vulturally speaking” like the author, I thoroughly enjoyed the excavation…’ – Hayden Murphy, Sunday Herald

‘The Nine of Diamonds: Surroial Mordantless is a shamanic summoning up of the bloody and betrayed spirit of the Battle of Culloden… Norrie’s assumption of a historic Highland persona is essential to this extraordinary and gorgeous piece of writing.’ – Claire Crowther, Magma

‘The book intertwines the work of historical recovery with the poetics of chance intuited from the form of the card game… Its project is nothing less than a Scots modernist epic poem, an attempt to encapsulate Scots traditions, language and politics as Federico García Lorca did for Andalusia.’ – Sophie Mayer, The Poetry Review

MacGillivray reads from The Nine of Diamonds

MacGillivray reads extracts The Nine of Diamonds in this MacGillivray/Anonymous Bosch video.

MacGillivray’s trailer film for The Nine of Diamonds

This short trailer video evokes the mood and background of The Nine of Diamonds (MacGillivray/Anonymous Bosch production).

Extract

from PACE 1

SUIT OF THE GAELIC GARDEN OF THE DEAD

‘The divination by the taghairm was once a noted superstition among the Gaels of Scotland. When any important question concerning futurity arose and of which a solution was, by all means, desirable, some shrewder person than his neighbours was pitched upon to perform the part of a prophet. This person was wrapped in the warm smoking hide of a newly-slain stag or ox and laid at full length in the wildest recess of some lonely waterfall. The question was then put to him and the oracle was left in solitude to consider it. Here he lay for some hours with his cloak of knowledge around him and over his head, no doubt, to see the better into futurity; deafened by the incessant roaring of the torrent; every sense assailed; his body steaming; his fancy in a ferment; and whatever notion had found its way into his mind from so many sources of prophecy, it was firmly believed to have been communicated by invisible beings who were supposed to haunt such solitudes.’ – Dwelly’s Scottish Gaelic Dictionary (1911)

I

In the Gaelic Garden of the Dead I am lying passionless, water-spent,

whose dream-traiked crystal, water-stolen, falls –

obdure, you rustic mirror of shades, whose high wall is breathing

grim, water-scryed intent.

With water cells shrunk about the waist I walk,

paths of cinnamon at my feet,

where vultures fang bone on the sandalwood trail,

fang leaky meat from the old gang dule,

skulk the dusted dream-thief pile.

My shade is spiked with flowers

gently lifting in my shadow,

whose parched fire grew garden dreams, dire dule-trees,

row on row, sparkling in the mud.

Shriver-grief shrunk too late, in dream deteriorate:

the pause, my tears, the suffix,

parched hand-strewn, leaking.

Coaxing the woods,

saltire of fire

gags the derangement mouth:

Coaxing wood from my swollen eyes –

crawling about their cinder pile,

wood densely compressed with unfelled tears

my lids now rust around stoppered drops

I pause to coax their harrow-juice –

Unkindled eyes!

Unkindled breath! Unkindled throat!

My lustral tongue, my lustral tear.

II

I was young on hope and en-wildening expectation,

in the colour bitterness of this Gaelic garden.

Such star expulsion, canker-witted and rotten,

gave fumigation to souring dreams, furnishing the loss

of new rubbed leaves, ones stun-crushed by disbelief

into freshly perfumed poison.

Witless and stark they rustled; the darkling sedge

bloomed the last of its bud-punctured petals,

searing through tightness like nettle wands

brandished in whipping tips when the next season brightened.

What canticle of water-star root, hereditary dip-water,

flea-water chosen; that bright-hipped, blushed black

when the fires were scrying and I wept in the sod-dark

of vegetation weakened with flame.

The hedge-lip of stars and dereliction,

water that stains the grief of its own tremendous gestation;

nothing being taken without thoroughly knowing

the symptoms of its undertaking.

And simmered young, mummies thrum,

paste of sugar-fly, paste of polywater tree

and soldered to my eyes plaster-stars moult

flakes of preservation.

In youth I walked that fire-addled garden

the concubine of rusting trees, now filled with lumbering bees

and no-one to siphon off their sweetness,

while the wild glen raged with the last of the roses –

filaments of ashen compression

like the ashen faces each lyant morning,

ashen in the weak crease of dream,

compressed to the early ingredients of diamond.

Contents List

Stakes 9

Pace 1: Suit of the Gaelic Garden of the Dead 9

Pace 2: Suit of the Plaster Cast Nervous System 19

Pace 3: Surroial Mordant Suit 27

Pace 4: Suit of the Electrostatic Riverbed 37

Pace 5: Suit of the Rustit Kaleidoscope 45

Pace 6: Suit of the Furta Sacra of Robs and Waifs 53

Pace 7: Suit of the Fairy Crois Taireadh 57

Pace 8: Colour Bitter Suit 65

Pace 9: Suit of the Diamond Scratched Pane 71

Postscript 79

Notes 83

Acknowledgements 93

MacGillivray 94

Related Reviews

‘There are not many books of poetry that can be classified as genuinely original and large in scope; even among the disputed ground of “innovative writing” there is little that is truly groundbreaking. Reading The Last Wolf of Scotland, however, I feel that I may have found just that sort of book.’ – Steven Waling, Magma